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EVE Evolved: Has EVE Online boxed itself in?
When I was first introduced to EVE Online in 2004, it was an empty shell of a game. There were only three classes of ship, no alliances or starbases, and neither exploration complexes nor level 4 missions existed yet. EVE consisted of 5,000 systems of almost completely empty space populated by less than 50,000 players. The user interface was an order of magnitude worse than it is today (if you can imagine that), and the tutorial just dropped you in the middle of space with the ship equivalent of a pea shooter and a less-than-enthusiastic "good luck!" Though much of the game was empty, it sat before players like a blank galactic canvas. Not only could players paint their own stories into the game world, but EVE's highly active development team was updating the game at lightning speed. Players instinctively filled the voids in the game with their hopes and dreams, projecting all the things that EVE could be into the gaps. People shared ideas on the forum directly with the developers, and practically anything was possible. Things aren't quite the same today, as new ideas have to be compatible with over nine years' worth of updates, and developer CCP Games really can't afford to rock the boat and potentially lose subscriptions. In this week's EVE Evolved, I consider whether the past nine years of development has boxed EVE in, forcing the gameplay down an ever-narrowing branch of choices.
EVE Evolved: The making of EVE Online, part 2
With all tech 2 modules now released into the game and their blueprints handed out to players, the tech 2 blueprint lottery officially shut down during this expansion period and was replaced by the Invention mechanic. Invention allows players to create their own inefficient limited-run tech 2 blueprint copies, putting the supply of tech 2 ships and modules into the hands of the general EVE populace rather than those lucky enough to have won the original tech 2 blueprints. This patch also brought in the entirely new contracts system, which replaced the escrow system that was starting to show its age and was becoming a lot less useful for finding what you wanted.
